Of all old synths that i heard enough to know, this is one of my 5 all time favorites, and the only digital one on that list. This is the very best vintage digital synth. This is the synth that is responsible for most of the sounds in Psygone tracks of the old optimistique album & a lot of old hypnotic records danish 90s trance tracks. Go Listen to the track Costra Nemus. thats classic JD-800.

This would be one of the best synths to make an emulator for. Its under rated, i like it better than a jupiter or juno.

I think what made it interesting is that it was a digital synth of the era (rompler) but that it had lots of sliders so there was not the endless menu diving which gave it a good playability.

It's a bit more complex than that. The sliders made it great to work with but underneath are a lot of settings. It could make patches out of 4 sounds. Waveforms from basic saw to breath and drumsounds etc. Over those parts you can do separate fx, and then also a master fx/eq setting. Soundwise you could make heaps of different sounds. The fx are quite good.

I have the synth right here and it can still hold it's own. Leads, basses and percussive sounds were my favorite to make. Now it's here to occasionally freak with and resample stuff.

Even in multi mode it was great to use. The drumchannel, like the JV1080's one, is very versatile and you could create a lot of different sounds per key. (Classic midi channel 10 days)

I think what made it interesting is that it was a digital synth of the era (rompler) but that it had lots of sliders so there was not the endless menu diving which gave it a good playability.

I dont have 5 posts yet so i cant give you a good example of why a JD-800 sounds good, but if you just go type Psygone - Costra Nemus , right from the beginning pad thats a JD-800 as well as most the song. That kind of sound can be reproduced with other synths its just that the JD-800 tended to make it easier to make cool sounds. please note that song is from 1997

The JD-800 is nothing special at all.. other than it's interface. Would think people understood this by now. It's one of the first in a very long line of JV series synths by Roland. They milked that concept for literally two decades!

To quote Nico from page 1 of this thread:

brok landers wrote:to clatify this: the jd800 has absoluteley nothing to do with the d50, exept it has some presets of the d50 as basic samples, which other roland romplers (like the jv880) had, too ... the jd 800 is a basic, 4-tone-makes-one-patch-typical-roland synth ... the onlything that makes it a bit different is the interface and the fact that it misses the structure-combination that roland used from then on in a lot of their synths ...

This.

EDIT: I always suggest people who want a JV series synth look at getting the JV-2080 + expansions and then get a nice editor for it and run that editor with some awesome midi controller. If you use FL Studio then I'm sure somebody has already built the editor for FL studio's patch thing and you can use it right away. It's such a common synth. You can see it on ebay for 150 to 200 euros. I've even seen them sell for as little as 80 euros which is absolutely ridiculous considering the power on offer.

I have a JD-800 sitting in my attic and a JV-2080 in a rack near me. Neither one has been switched on in years. Both were cool back in the day but both are outclassed by modern synths. The one great thing about the JD-800, it's control surface, would be lost in a VST version.

The reason why a certain record made with a JD-800 sounds great is because the artist was talented. Not because the JD-800 is some kind of secret weapon.

Frantz wrote:I have a JD-800 sitting in my attic and a JV-2080 in a rack near me. Neither one has been switched on in years. Both were cool back in the day but both are outclassed by modern synths. The one great thing about the JD-800, it's control surface, would be lost in a VST version.

The reason why a certain record made with a JD-800 sounds great is because the artist was talented. Not because the JD-800 is some kind of secret weapon.

Yes artist talent, but; You cant reproduce sounds certain synths have due to the limitation of filtering and other factors, unless its an actual emulation of the synth. I know this example is overused, but can you make a 303 without using an emulator such as Phoscyon, rebirth, Audiorealism or VB? No you cant because the filter, accents. Sorry for the 303 analogy but its the most powerful and simple analogy . yes its control surface is the coolest thing about it.

I dont know, i have synaesthesia and very sensitive hearing and i love that synth, Needs an emulator. Then again, i have a feeling you and others would not agree with, I think music its self is dying in general, i still like some downtempo from the past 5 years, but all new music now sounds horrible to me except some downtempo. Or if someone made a good modern classical piece of symphony . Music is dying, because melody is now old and over-done. And of course all the best sounds would have been used first once the technology existed, like not being able to resist eating your favorite meals first after shopping lol. music is dying but im on this forum anyway.,

People have been saying music is dying ever since the phonograph, and probably long before that. No doubt people in the Baroque period thought this new crap was all terrible and music was dying. Probably when the first caveman made a flute from a hollow reed or a bone, somebody said music was dying.

Yep, Roland JD-990, the one actually worth emulating over any other JD/JV rompler, except that it won't happen. I'm talking about the sound engine/character, the same sample libraries were edited/mutilated to fit most Roland romplers from those days and are best in their more whole sample library formats which in turn would rather point to S-line. From there S-770 would stand above the rest, some limitations aside. But nobody needs software samplers anymore, so back to libraries which are not available/usable in a sense of really emulating the hw except for the few lucky hardware users who don't need emulation, they have the real things. Nice loop.